Elon Musk launches Grokipedia as a competitor to online encyclopedia Wikipedia

(Patria) - Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire wants to position as a rival to Wikipedia, AP reported.

Writing on social media, Musk said Grokipedia.com is "now live" and that his goal is "truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".

Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with "propaganda" and urged people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a non-profit organization. In September, he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.

The Grokipedia site has a minimalist look with little more than a search bar where users can enter queries. It is stated to have 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than seven million articles in English.

Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the World Series of Baseball, or Buckingham Palace.

While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it is unclear how exactly articles on Grokipedia are compiled. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk's Grok chatbot, but some articles appear to be adapted from Wikipedia.

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation said on Tuesday that it was "still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works".

As a vast repository of well-constructed sentences with few restrictions on how it is used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok's rivals ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

"This human-generated knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content. Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist," the Wikimedia Foundation said. Wikipedia has been the target of the political right for months. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress launched an investigation in August into alleged "manipulative efforts" in Wikipedia's editing process that they said could introduce bias and undermine neutral views on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite almost every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences that are not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia's entries have few sources, such as the entry on the Chola dynasty in southern India which has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia's which has 113 linked sources and dozens of reference books.

Grokipedia's article on Wikipedia accuses the site of "systemic ideological biases - specifically a left-leaning slant in reporting on political figures and topics".

The Wikimedia Foundation said in its statement on Tuesday: "Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia's strengths are clear - it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular viewpoint."